Emanuela Fanelli opens Rome's film festival for a second time, in a role about learning to see herself

Emanuela Fanelli walked the red carpet of the Festa del Cinema di Roma on October 13, 2026, for the second time as a cast member of the festival's opening film. The 21st edition opened that evening with Paolo Genovese's Il rumore delle cose nuove (literally, The Noise of New Things), a drama about three couples in Milan that reaches Italian cinemas on November 12.

An opening night that grew by a day

The Rome festival, which the Italians call simply the Festa, runs from October 13 to October 25, 2026, at the Auditorium Parco della Musica Ennio Morricone and in other venues of the capital. According to the Italian art magazine Artribune, the start was moved up to October 13 because more films had been submitted and independent producers and distributors had asked for more room. Its artistic director is Paola Malanga.

The lifestyle site DiLei counts about 150 titles from 55 countries this year, with career awards for Javier Bardem and Julianne Moore. The evening was hosted by Ema Stokholma, and the film was shown in the Grand Public section.

The festival chose the actress Monica Vitti for its official image this year, ninety-five years after her birth. The photograph, by Sergio Strizzi, comes from the set of Michelangelo Antonioni's L'eclisse (1962), and Strizzi gets an exhibition of about thirty photographs in the Foyer Petrassi of the Auditorium, Artribune reports. On the opening night, the British producer Tessa Ross received an industry lifetime achievement award from the director Edward Berger.

The festival's own programme lists the film at 113 minutes, produced in Italy in 2026, with Fanelli first in the cast list, followed by Edoardo Pesce, Claudia Pandolfi, Lino Musella, Stefano Accorsi, Vittoria Puccini and Claudio Santamaria. The production companies named by Quinlan are Leone Film Group, Lotus Production and Rai Cinema.

Three couples, one secret each

The story follows three households in Milan who live in parallel without knowing each other. Andrea, a photographer played by Accorsi, wants a child; his wife Andreina, a nurse played by Puccini, is afraid of becoming a mother, according to the film site Like in a Movie. Viola (Pandolfi) and Ralph (Musella), a sound artist, are stretched by money worries and by the bullying of their son Mirko at school.

The third couple is Alba and Umberto. Umberto, played by Pesce, wears a mouse costume to cheer children in hospital wards. At home, the same outlet writes, he turns violent towards Alba, the character played by Fanelli.

A chance meeting between Viola and Andrea sets off a chain reaction. It reaches all three families, and the title plays on that double nature: noise can console or disturb, and new things can bring relief or an earthquake. Genovese told the press conference that every character will have to let go of something that no longer belongs to them.

The film comes from his own novel, published by Einaudi in 2023, and he wrote the screenplay with Igor Artibani. The director said he changed the characters along the way because sensibilities shift: "in quattro anni le sensibilità cambiano", as DiLei quotes him, so the ending is not the book's.

What Genovese keeps asking

Genovese built his name on secrets. Perfetti sconosciuti, where guests at a dinner put their phones on the table, became the film with the most remakes in cinema history, about fifty worldwide, and won two David di Donatello awards, Like in a Movie reports. His 2025 comedy Follemente was the top-grossing Italian film of its year and took two Nastri d'Argento.

This time the hidden material is deeper. Adnkronos quotes him saying he is drawn to "tutto ciò che sta dietro, o dentro" people, and calls the new film's subject the secrets of the soul, the things people leave dormant and do not share with those close to them.

It is also a homecoming. Genovese, a Roman, returns to the festival three years after presenting I leoni di Sicilia, a television series he directed, RomaToday notes, and his film The Place closed the Rome festival in 2017, according to Quinlan's archive. Cinematografo calls him extremely prolific and well loved at the box office, with a career that moves between the spiritual (Il primo giorno della mia vita) and the earthly (Tutta colpa di Freud), but always intimate.

In another line DiLei attributes to him, the title explains itself: "sono proprio le cose che non diciamo a fare più rumore". He also tied the film to Perfetti sconosciuti and Follemente as a thread of three very different films about what comes back from the hidden.

Fanelli's second opening night

Fanelli, born in Rome in 1986, came to cinema after more than ten years of sketch comedy on television, according to her English Wikipedia entry. She began on stage as a teenager, made her film debut in 2015 in Claudio Caligari's Don't Be Bad, and has appeared on Rai Radio 2 since 2016. In 2021 she took part in the Sanremo Music Festival and served as patroness of the awards ceremony at the Torino Film Festival.

She won the David di Donatello for best supporting actress in 2022 for Paolo Virzì's Dry and again in 2024 for Paola Cortellesi's There's Still Tomorrow.

That second film, in which she played Marisa, the friend of the heroine, was also the opening film of the Rome festival in 2023. It debuted with €1.6 million on its first weekend, the highest opening weekend for an Italian production that year, passed €20 million on November 23, and ended with €32.4 million, the most of any film in Italy in 2023 and ahead of Barbie. Those figures come from the English Wikipedia page on the film, which cites the trade press, not from a box office database we could read.

On the red carpet, Fanelli told the Roman site RomaToday that it is always wonderful to be at the opening, which begins the festival in her own city. She added that Cortellesi presented there what she calls her "film del cuore".

Cortellesi's film was set in the 1940s, after the Second World War, and followed Delia, a wife and mother of three who is beaten and belittled by her husband Ivano. Italian critics praised its handling of feminism and patriarchy, and singled out the acting of Cortellesi, Fanelli and Valerio Mastandrea. Genovese's film moves the same theme to a Milan of 2026.

The two roles are linked. She drew the link herself. In 2023 her character tried to look at a friend with love, hoping the friend would see herself as Marisa saw her. In Genovese's film, Fanelli said, her character must remember how to look at herself.

For Adnkronos she described Alba as a person who moved her a great deal, because she is very pure and luminous. Like in a Movie adds that the light goes out inside the house, where Alba comes to see herself through her partner's eyes and to feel always in the wrong.

Two critics, two verdicts

RomaToday called the premiere a great success and described a red carpet that was light, playful and full of knowing glances between the actors. The critics who have written so far were less warm. Two of them gave middling marks.

The Italian film magazine Cinematografo gave the film 2.5 out of 5. Its reviewer found a choral story about people who have lost their way, but one that puts "troppa carne al fuoco": domestic violence and the feelings of a disabled man are among the themes it takes on, and the meetings between characters feel forced.

The review in Quinlan, dated October 18, 2026, and signed by Donato D'Elia, gave a mark of 5.5. It argued that the film trades the single strong idea of Perfetti sconosciuti and Follemente for an ambitious ensemble drama, yet keeps Genovese's export-friendly style, and imagines the story remade in Spain or France with little change. His Milan, D'Elia wrote, is a generic European city, one that could be a thousand others. The same review singles out Fanelli among the best of the cast, while adding that she stays within the type of character Virzì and Cortellesi have long given her. Pesce's double role, a clown in the wards and a bully at home, is for D'Elia the film's clearest image of the duplicity shared by the other characters.

The Quinlan critic also asks whether the film will win over the Italian public once more.

No ticket figure exists yet. Genovese's previous film, Follemente, topped the Italian box office of 2025, and nothing so far shows whether this one will follow it.

What comes next

The film is distributed by 01 Distribution and opens in Italian cinemas on November 12, 2026. The festival around it continues until October 25.

The same programme carries Elisa's film Kintsugi… e sono la mia opera, which we covered earlier. For a very different Italian release, Italy's horror pick for the Oscars also divided critics.

Sources

• Festival programme 2026, Fondazione Cinema per Roma